


you're not the one leaving marks on him

by kiiouex, telekinesiskid



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Boyfriend Custody Battle, Bruises, M/M, POV Second Person, Possessive Behavior, Possibly Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-24
Updated: 2016-02-24
Packaged: 2018-05-22 23:26:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6097415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex, https://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid/pseuds/telekinesiskid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are bruises in the shape of thumbs on his wrist, bruises on the crook of his elbow, bruises on his knees. Bruises everywhere.</p><p>Your hand ghosts over them, starting at his wrist, and you follow them up his arm. Kavinsky never has to be reminded of you like this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	you're not the one leaving marks on him

**Author's Note:**

> tk wrote this, and then I... wrote over it? We haven't done this before haa but it's a pretty good collaborative effort, we had fun

It’s two hours past when Kavinsky had promised to drop him off. You knew you should’ve picked him up yourself; you should’ve known better than to rely on a boy whose connection to reality is fragile at best.

You sit on your bed and watch the rain leak slowly down the window panes, puddling on the sill. There’s a very fine mist outside, muting the deep blue of the post-sunset sky. You miss him. Your thumb runs up and down your wrist gentle, just so, in anticipation of him, and you don’t even mind that he’s late; you just want to see him again. It’s been a full week. A week with no word from him. Something buried deep within you aches, something that’s getting harder to brush aside.

You try calling again, already resigned to his oh-so-clever fake-out voicemail before it happens; the cheerful “hello?” followed by a few gracious seconds of silence and then the obvious, obnoxious “just kidding; you know the drill.”

You drop your phone back to your bed. You shouldn’t be so disappointed that he won’t answer after a week of missed calls, and you should stop hoping to find the exception instead of the rule. He probably doesn’t even have his phone on him anymore. You imagine it wedged in a backseat, abandoned on the roadside, crushed under a set of vicious black wheels.

And then you hear it. That familiar, distant blight of a roar, racing down your street. You walk to the window and peer down to see Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi, precariously parked on the sidewalk, like he narrowly missed a collision with the street lamp. You can’t help your erratic heartbeat when you see the door kicked open. Ronan pulls himself out like he has to fight the Mitsubishi’s magnetism, unfolding himself like he hasn’t stood in a week.

He slings his duffel bag over one shoulder – you note with a twinge of irritation that it looks half-empty, and you really hope that it’s his clothes that have gone AWOL, not his textbooks – and makes a rude gesture into the car before he slams the door. The Evo makes a noise like an oncoming storm as it prepares to speed away, smoke rising off the back wheels, tyre burns fresh on the wet tarmac. Ronan flips it off as it shoots down the street, but you can see the broad smile on his face from here.

You wait for him to kick open your door too.

“Hey,” he says, managing to meet your gaze for less than a second before looking away, turning to dump his bag on the floor. It makes a pathetic sound as it crumples against the floorboards, like there’s barely anything in it at all. He kicks off his unlaced combat boots, and they scatter over the floor, leaving clumps of dirt in their wake. “Sorry I’m late – had to drop Proko off. He crashed his fuckin’ Golf. Got chased by a police car, too – thought he might’ve made the news.”

You run your thumb over your wrist once more.

“It’s not fair,” you murmur, and he turns to look at you. He stares, only as guilty as he thinks he should be.

“Gansey.”

“He keeps you late. He nearly gets you arrested.” You know you’re being petty, but this has been happening for too many weeks and now you just can’t help it. For one single moment, you want to be the selfish one. You want him to know how much it hurts you. “You always need recovery time after him.”

He breathes a hard sigh, but crosses the room and joins you on the bed. He stinks of gasoline and smoke and sweat, hard liquor and _Kavinsky._ You want to wrinkle your nose at it, but it’s the combination of smells that you’ve come to associate with him lately, he wears them so often. Even when he’s several showers past Kavinsky, he still reeks of destruction and death.

He puts a hand on your knee, and while you want to draw at least a little comfort from the gesture, you’re too distracted by the state of his arm. There’s dry blood all down the side of it – not from a wound on his arm but a wound _elsewhere,_ carelessly transferred. There are bruises in the shape of thumbs on his wrist, bruises on the crook of his elbow, bruises on his knees. Bruises everywhere.

Your hand ghosts over them, starting at his wrist, and you follow them up his arm. You always leave him unmarked; Kavinsky never has to be reminded of you. Just another small victory for the bastard.

“You can’t fuck me by the way,” Ronan announces, as if he expects that to be on your mind. “Too sore.”

“Well, then…”

Your hand reaches for the front of his pants, but he seizes your wrist and hisses pre-emptively. “Not there either,” he says grimly, smile taut and thin. “Too sore.”

He sets your hand back and you stare at him knowing full well how miserable you must seem. He doesn’t look like he’s in pain, unless he moves suddenly, or slowly, or at all. “Just once,” you murmur mournfully, “Just once, I wish he would return you to me, healthy and unmarked and intact. He thinks he can treat you however he likes because I’ll patch you up. It isn’t right. It isn’t _fair_.”

“Life’s not fair, Gansey,” Ronan sighs as he lies down, stretching his legs out over your lap. He settles his arms behind his head and smiles lopsidedly at you. The purple shadows are dark under his eyes, like fading bruises or sleepless nights; you can’t tell. Probably both. “Kavinsky is life.”

You couldn’t disagree more. “I worry about you with him,” you admit, running your gentle hands over as much of him as you can without making him wince. When your fingers stray under his shirt you feel warped, ruined skin. When you push the cloth away you find little angry, black pockmarks scattered across his stomach, like cigarette burns. The very idea that Kavinsky would use Ronan – _Ronan_ – as an ashtray fills you with equal parts revulsion and misery. “You shouldn’t let him do this.”

“He treats everyone the way he’d like to be treated,” Ronan says, as though it’s a reasonable explanation for Kavinsky’s actions, for his own acceptance of them. “Y’know. Like trash.”

Your hand finds his face and you, only you, know how to fit your palm around his jaw so it doesn’t cut you. “You’re not trash,” you remind him, and he scoffs.

“I kind of am.” He says it lightly, but you still sigh, and his brows tick closed. “Look, what _exactly_ is it that you’re afraid of?” he asks, pushing himself up onto his elbows. He waits for your eyes to return to his and he raises his eyebrows, pointed.

You open your mouth to speak discreetly and too-honest words spill out instead. “I’m afraid you’re going to ignore your limits.”

“Kavinsky has no limits.”

“But _you do,_ ” you insist, and Ronan moans like you’re awful as he drops back onto the bed. You take your fingers to the curve of his neck, mindful of the heavy, purple marks pressed into his skin. “You look like you’ve been _choked._ ”

Ronan shrugs, forcibly nonchalant, but you can still feel him swallow. “Maybe I like it.”

“Do you?”

He peers up at you, eyes sharp.

“Or do you just like Kavinsky?”

“We don’t have to do this,” he tells you, and your heart immediately sinks in your chest, settles somewhere low in the pit of your stomach. It’s not the first time you’ve pushed things this far, and it won’t be the last. He makes the standard offer: “If it’s not working for you, we can just stop.”

Your fingers trail up to his jawbone. His eyes close for a moment as you brush the pad of your thumb across his bottom lip. “I don’t want to,” you finally murmur.

“It’s this or nothing, Gansey,” he reminds you, low and strangely regretful.

“I know.”

Ronan sighs. He turns his face into your hand and kisses the centre of your palm. “Let’s go to bed,” he says by way of _let’s stop fighting._ “I’m fuckin’ tired. Rub my back or something. Tell me how World War III broke out while I was off the grid or whatever.”

He rolls onto his back, shrugs his shirt over his head and tosses it to the floor. It’s dim, and the Celtic knots of his tattoo look blacker than ever, but you still catch glimpses of thin red and puffy scrapes between his shoulder blades, down to the small of his back. Kavinsky clawed him up good, and you wonder if it was for him or Ronan or you. You lean down to press a kiss to the worst of it, and he still smells like sweat and sex and blood. You think if Kavinsky could catch the fragrance he’d bottle it, sell it, call it something distasteful, like _Just Say Yes_ or _Bitches Get Stitches._

You move your slow, careful hands over Ronan’s back as he breathes out a low, relieved hum of approval. Barely a minute passes and he sounds as if he’s fallen asleep; you doubt there’s been one gentle hand on him since he left you a week ago.

You wonder if he misses you as much as you miss him.

**Author's Note:**

> Let us know you what you thought ;o
> 
> [kiiouex's tumblr](http://kiiouex.tumblr.com/) | [telekinesiskid's tumblr](http://telekinesiskid.tumblr.com/)


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